


Secure and Fast

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 18:36:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5795485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wouldn’t say he was ever friends with Ben Solo, really, but Poe Dameron also wouldn’t say they were ever complete strangers to one another before that moment on Jakku.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secure and Fast

…

When he was younger, Poe thought this tree’s roots were so deep and so strong that they reached all the way to the center of the world.

Its rippled gray bark is streaked through with gold. Its leaves can turn any kind of sunlight into the color of a warm afternoon, so that beneath these branches all time seems to temporarily stop. Poe had believed that if a giant were to ever stoop down and grab this tree by its trunk, then their house and their yard and the whole rest of Yavin 4 would be yanked up and swung around like a hammer – but the tree’s roots would hold.

_(“It was a gift,”_ Mom had told him, _“from Grand Master Skywalker. He told me it can sense the Force. Do you have any idea what that means?”_ )

But then Mom had died, and Poe wasn’t so sure anymore.

“I’m going to go be trained by my uncle,” Ben says, possibly for the second time. Poe hasn’t been listening. “I might be away for years _._ The next time you see me, I’ll be a Jedi Master.”

They sit side by side on a branch together, which Poe has only permitted on the condition that Ben not say anything bizarre about what it might be like to die, or how people have age-rings inside of them just the same way trees do, or how if you look closely enough you can see that emotions all have different colors.

(Ben is only three years younger than Poe, but just now the distance separating ten and thirteen forms a chasm between them.)

“Sure, sure – Jedi Master Ben Chewbacca Solo. Nice.” Poe takes a rock from his pocket and flings it through the tree’s branches. Dad and General Organa are talking somewhere, but it’s not anywhere he’s allowed to be. “And I’ll be a squad commander in the New Republic Starfleet.”

“My mother thinks so.” With those ears and that big, dour mouth, a scowl always looks a bit farcical on Ben’s long face. “She likes you. She says you have a lot of spirit.”

“Why d’you call her that all the time, anyway? _Mother_ this, _mother_ that?” Poe grips his legs around the branch and flips himself backwards in an acrobatic heave, swinging by his knees through empty space, mostly because he knows Ben can’t do the same thing without getting a nosebleed. “Don’t you realize how weird it sounds?  If you’re gonna make any friends at this Jedi Daycare place, you really need to stop talking like an old man with a stick up his ass.”

“I don’t talk like an old man with a stick up his a– butt. I’m just eloquent.” Ben turns around, carefully, and instead drapes himself stomach-flat over the branch like the wet blanket he usually is. He keeps staring at Poe. “Why do you come out here all the time if it makes you sad?”

Blood is rushing to his ears by now, so Poe doesn’t have anything left over to blush with in embarrassment at – what? 

What’s the word for having your mind read without permission, when you’re in the middle of thinking about how your mom held you in her lap to pretend you were a pilot, or combed your hair, or didn’t laugh at how dumb you looked with your cheek pressed up against a tree trunk?

“…Kid, I thought I asked you to please not do any of those weirdo mind tricks around me.”

“It’s not weird. For me, it’s perfectly normal.” Ben reaches up to pluck a leaf, tugs at it with his fingers. “And being sad isn’t weird either.” 

Poe sighs. 

(What else can you expect, though, from a kid whose grandfather’s Sith Lord name still isn’t spoken aloud because it might bring bad luck?)  

“It doesn’t make me sad. It’s – it’s like a homesick feeling, but different.” He pulls himself up to a sitting position again. “You think about good things in the past, and they make you happy, but they make you sad too because you’re not there anymore. You’re here. In the – the present, I guess. You’re here, and you can’t ever go back again. There isn’t a word for that feeling.”

“Yes there is. It’s called _nostalgia_.” Ben sits upright as well.  “If you’d ever actually read any of those datacards I loaned you, you’d know that.”

Poe sits for a moment and listens to buzzing summer air, to the leaves and branches shifting around them. He’d like to stay here, too, fixed in this particular present like the image in a holopic, but of course he knows he can’t. 

(Neither of them can.)

“All right, then. Nostalgia it is.” Then he slaps Ben on the back, nearly knocks him face-first out of the tree, so he has to grab the kid’s collar and steady him again. “Let’s hope I won’t find much use for it, huh?”

…

_“Turn the key and bolt the door,  
Sweet is death forevermore.  
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,  
Nor murdering hate, can enter in._  
  
_All is now secure and fast;_  
_Not the gods can shake the Past;_  
 _Flies-to the adamantine door_  
 _Bolted down forevermore.”_

\- from “The Past,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson 


End file.
